The trials of Rolando Villazón are well documented; he burst onto the
operatic scene in the early years of the new millennium, made three
best-selling operatic recital albums between 2003 and 2005 and sang
worldwide. Then in 2007 he suffered catastrophic vocal damage requiring
surgery to remove a cyst on his vocal cords which necessitated a two year
rest from the stage. He then worked very hard to retrain his voice, relaunch
his career and make a comeback mostly as a Mozart tenor, thereby avoiding
the kind of strain that the biggest Verdi roles place on a voice.
He is a most musical performer with a distinctive, slightly throaty
timbre, and is recognisably the same singer who so impressed us twelve years
ago. However, comparison with that first recital reveals that his voice,
while still beautiful, is a somewhat “low-fat” version of its original self.
His singing is audibly more refined, more careful and more restrained,
although certainly not without passion. Presumably this is a good thing
considering the problems his previously unstinting commitment caused and the
fact that he is now singing more intelligently and more within himself. That
said, one cannot help but notice an element of diminishment in its essential
sound.
The sixteen songs here, four from each of four composers, were written for
piano accompaniment but have been newly arranged for orchestral
accompaniment. That orchestration is imaginative but unobtrusive, tasteful
and apt. Some of the repertoire has been previously recorded in 1973 on a
concert recital album by Pavarotti for Decca, in considerably soupier
orchestral arrangements by Gamley. Pavarotti remains the more refined and
elegant artist but the plangency and expressiveness of Villazón’s tones are
eminently suited to the music and he brings real imagination to its
delivery.
The Bellini songs are as graceful as one would expect from a composer
memorably described by Heine as "a sigh in dancing pumps and
silk stockings". The fourth, “Torna, vezzosa Fillide” is more
substantial, episodic and almost operatic in scale, an impression cemented
by the concluding storm section. Villazón’s climactic top A is a tad
unsteady, and the same top note in Rossini’s “La danza” sounds laboured, but
he displays a ringing top B in the latter’s “La lontananza”, suggesting that
his recovery is mostly successful. He transposes the “Malinconia, ninfa
gentile” down a tone to B compared with Pavarotti’s C major; presumably
playing safe.
The Donizetti songs are somewhat conventional and rather maudlin but given
the most persuasive advocacy, whereas the Rossini songs are irrepressibly
charming and cheerful even when treating of melancholy topics. Verdi was not
perhaps strictly speaking in the same category as the other three composers
of Romantic songs but he was their inheritor and his cantilena melodies in
familiar 6/8 triple time add a welcome dash of humanistic drama to the mix.
However, their operatic quality, emphasised by the orchestration, also
emphasises the loss of resonance in Villazón’s tenor. The contribution by
Cecilia Bartoli to the last Rossini duet in French, “Les amants de Seville”,
is welcome but the audibility of her intake of breath betrays just how
closely her voice had to be recorded to match, and avoid being swamped by,
the tenor even in this more cautious phase of his vocal estate.
Ralph Moore
Track-List
Vincenzo BELLINI (1801 - 1835)
1. Ma rendi pur contento [2:24]
2. Malinconia, ninfa gentile [1:36]
3. Vaga luna, che inargenti [3:35]
4. Torna, vezzosa Fillide [8:16]
Giuseppe VERDI (1813 - 1901)
5. Deh, pietoso, o Addolorata [4:41]
6. Non t'accostare all'urna [4:03]
7. Il poveretto [2:19]
8. Il mistero [3:34]
Gaetano DONIZETTI (1797 - 1848)
9. L'amor funesto [5:40]
10. Una lagrima (Preghiera) [4:12]
11. Il sospiro [3:13]
12. La Mère et l'Enfant [5:18]
Gioacchino ROSSINI (1792 - 1868)
Péchés de vieillesse Vol. III
13. L'esule [3:52]
Les soirées musicales
14. La danza (Già la luna è in mezzo al mare) [3:13]
Péchés de vieillesse Vol. I
15. La lontananza [4:01]
Rolando Villazón, Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Marco
Armiliato
Péchés de vieillesse Vol. III
16. Tirana pour deux voix (Les amants de Séville) [4:29]
